Remarks

Predominantly 1st person singular narrative - Galesia talking to her best female friend, time 1688, place: Garden in St Germains, France - presented with all signs of personal involvement. The title's promise strangely contrasts with the narration itself. Galesia did not plot an intrigue to marry the man she loved. Her narration shows her on the contrary most virtuously rejecting him with all the help of an affected coolness and dissimulated disintrest. The result of the strategy is desastrous - a vain pride in her own virtue prevents the very marriage she and her beloved one, Bosvil, most desired. Only later both lovers manage to confess their feelings. Even though Galesia realizes a personal tragedy in her decisions she remains unable to come to a definite moral judgement: was it vain pride or justified virtue guiding her? The final conversation solves the moral dilemma: She should have confided in her mother, the parents would have taken the neccessary steps to bring the couple together. Cf. Exilius (1715) with the plea for a new type of "romances" in which the parents will regain the role of the well respected authorities (and with an attack on the all the modern novels which regularily show the young generation busily intriguing and outwitting their parents only to arrange marriages no responsible parent would ever have consented in). The morals seems to be progressive - novels of the mid 18th century will arrive at a similar harmony between the generations. Jane Barker is, however, neither "a young lady" inventing a new sentimental social harmony - she is in her sixties, her own story happend in the 1680s. Nor is a relationship of natural confidence aspired. The moral solution given remains one of calculated efficiency rather than natural tenderness. Galesia herself analyses the reasons for her behavior with Rochester and all the authors of the 1670s who see human pretensions behind all the virtues displayed. Galesia's decision shows additional merits as the spinster develops the motivation to become the "Sappho" of her age. (The background remains autobiographical. Barker actually visited France in 1688 when the Stuarts emigrated; she never got married, converted to catholicism and finally became the author she herewith introduced).